Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
“If the 15th District is eliminated, Democrats can draw a map that makes one of the other Republican southern districts, the 12th or the 13th, more competitive in elections, according to John Jackson, a visiting professor at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.”
This is a nice way of saying that the Democrats intend to gerrymander a solidly Red district to flip it Blue.